"Kim Stanley Robinson - Vinland" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

grave and beyond. The creator of Vinland. Never to be
found.
The professor looked around, confused and sick.
There was a waist-high rock, a glacial erratic. He sat on
it. Put his head on his hands. Really quite
unprofessional. All those books he had read as a child.
What would the minister think! Grant money. No reason
to feel so bad!
At that latitude midsummer nights are short, and the
party had lasted late. The sky to the east was already
gray. He could see down onto the site, and its long sod
roofs. On the beach, a trio of long narrow high-ended
ships. Small figures in furs emerged from the longhouses
and went down to the water, and he walked among them
and heard their speech, a sort of dialect of Norwegian
that he could mostly understand. They would leave that
day, it was time to load the ships. They were going to
take everything with them, they didn't plan to return. Too
many skraelings in the forest, too many quick arrow
deaths. He walked among them, helping them load
stores. Then a little man in a black coat scurried behind
the forge, and he roared and took off after him, scooping
up a rock on the way, ready to deal out a skraeling death
to that black intruder.
The minister woke him with a touch of her hand. He
almost fell off the rock. He shook his head; he was still
drunk. The hangover wouldn't begin for a couple more
hours, though the sun was already up.
"I should have known all along," he said to her
angrily. "They were stretched to the limit in Greenland,
and the climate was worsening. It was amazing they got
that far. Vinland. . . " He waved a hand at the site-- "was
just some dreamer's story."
Regarding him calmly, the minister said, "I am not
sure it matters."
He looked up at her. "What do you mean?"
"History is made of stories people tell. And fictions,
dreams, hoaxes--they also are made of stories people tell.
True or false, it's the stories that matter to us. Certain
qualities in the stories themselves make them true or
false."
He shook his head. "Some things really happened in
the past. And some things didn't."
"But how can you know for sure which is which?
You can't go back and see for yourself. Maybe Vinland
was the invention of this mysterious stranger of yours;
maybe the Vikings came here after all, and landed
somewhere else. Either way it can never be anything
more than a story to us."
"But. . ." He swallowed. "Surely it matters whether